My Dad Left Me On the Last Day of Summer
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My dad left me on the last day of summer. The summer kept its promise and returned, but he didn’t. What was the point of living when you were going to die anyway? When they announced the list of the dead and my dad’s name was there, we cried. I would not wake up in the middle of the night to see him smoking again. No newspaper folding in the morning. No books he promised to buy. No freshly brewed coffee served. No him.
I volunteered to be a nurse in 1917. Not because I was crazed about war, but rather to find out more about my dad. Maybe I would meet his friends here, you know. Maybe they would tell me how badass my dad was fighting to dead and all that stuffs. Despite that, the main reason I volunteered was because I had lost the meaning of my life and did not have any courage to live on since he was gone. All I need was the strength to carry on with this shitty life and maybe—just maybe—someone knew what my dad’s last words were and could tell me. Many times I had imagined what his last words would be like. Maybe he would say something to me like—tell my daughter that she gotta live when I’m not here. Told her to stay strong and take care of her mother. It was pathetic, I knew, but I needed to know.
They sent me to France for training then dropped me in Italy for Red Cross Hospital. When people said the battlefield is like the hell, they should see the hospitals. The good thing about battlefield was that people there were cold dead, unlike here in the hospitals where people still alive and suffering and screaming. Basically we saw people slowly dying here, with pains and shattered dreams.
I did not know how long I had been here. Maybe two weeks, or two years. I started to lose track o...
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..., who would be buried someday with the question unanswered and the truth unrevealed.
I would never know any heroic deeds my dad did nor his last words. Maybe he said something like—God, please take care of my family—or maybe---Phil, tell Helen and Eleanor I love them—or maybe something like—This soup tastes weird. I would never know.
But that was ok. It was not about that that made me love him anyway. Even your dream was broken; the nostalgic memory would always remain to remind you how precious and true your dream was. And I appreciated it. I really did. Maybe my dad died for nothing and his life was useless. But my father was still my father, and no war can change that fact.
“Mom! I’m home!” I shouted, and ran as I saw my mum waiting on the front yard. She was crying, and I could see joy in her eyes from faraway.
You gotta live, Eleanor, Live. Live. Live. Live
When I was twelve years old, a close friend of mine passed away. At first, I didn’t know how to process what was happening. How can someone I’ve known for the majority of my life be gone? But then it finally hit me. My friend was really gone. There would be no more days challenging
The long parade to the graveyard! Father, Mother. Margaret, that is a dreadful way! You just came home in time for the funeral, Stella. And funerals are pretty much compared to deaths.
Though most have a desire to leave earth and enter eternal life peacefully, without any sorrow, the departure of a loved one can be despondent. Previously in 2011, my grandfather passed away due to heart failure. It was an arduous battle, not only for my grandfather, but also for the close knit family surrounding him. His battle with heart failure enabled me to create unforgettable memories with him, even in his final days. Laughing together, playing together and learning significant values about life together made me grow to become a more mature and wise person. Therefore, my personal experience is entwined with empathy because the death of my grandfather has made me realize how dismal it is to lose someone important. It also interplays with self-interest because I have grown as an individual to deal with the ache that is attached to losing a family member. It has helped me to realize how beautiful the gift of life is. Stephen Dunn, the poet behind Empathy and my story are connected because they both involve the feeling of empathy for others and the self-interest of an individual. They help us to grow and learn about ourselves and the emotions of
When I was four years old my father left home. Not only he changed neighborhood or town but he left the country. It may seem that I was too young to notice his absence, but the truth is that this changed my life completely. I was quite close to my father and even today I can remember the emptiness that I felt in my chest. At four years of age I did not realize that behind the story of his departure was one of the greatest life lessons that he taught me.
A major life event that started me to pursue an education in nursing was my time in basic training. The most life changing event during my induction into the army at ft. Jackson before starting basic training was accepting Christ as my personal lord and savior. When I decided to go into the Army 4 years out of high school I was a student firefighter E.M.T. working towards my paramedic, incidents at the Dept. I worked at both before and after some traumatic emergency responses actually turned me away from practicing any sort of medicine and causing me to seek the military for a new career or to pay for me to go back to school for another career if the military wasn’t my thing. During Basic training as stated above I was already a licensed E.M.T.
In the morning my father was there to drive us to school. I didn’t ask about the argument that I had heard the night before. I just figured somethings were better left alone. I could tell by my father’s face that he was upset. In all my fourteen years I had never seen him this upset accept for the night that my grandfather died.
Army, I experienced working with different cultures and personalities. I was first stationed in Camp Casey, South Korea, located 10 miles from the DMZ zone, and had the honor of working with Korean soldiers, traveling throughout South Korea and partaking in their culture and way of life. After a year, I was given orders to be stationed at Ft. Hood, Texas. During my last two years at Ft. Hood, TX, I led my platoon through company runs, physical activities, and obstacle courses. Needless to say, my initial interest in public health increased to a passion and yearning to learn more about the human body and health.
I have felt the pain of the loss of a Sister; have felt the pain of the death of my Mother, and felt the death of my Father. I know how it feels. I experienced it. It is painful, looking at those old kind folks who bore you; who took care of you; went through all kinds of sacrifices and pains just to look after you for years and years, until one day the child stood on one’s own two feet, and then … there they are, the parents, helpless and lifeless in front of you.
All of my life, until I was eighteen years old, I didn’t understand the concept of grieving. Grief just hasn’t been something I’ve ever had to experience before. Because of my lack of experience I had no understanding of what grieving felt like. All of his changed for me on July 29th.
Being a soldier was a really tough life. In the end I hated doing the same thing day after day with no change in sight, I despised the leaders that didn 't take care of their subordinates, and most importantly, I couldn 't lead my soldiers from the front anymore. I 'll be the first one to say that joining the army was the best thing to happen to me. I have grown so much as a person and the lessons I learned are invaluable. In the end I realized the negative factors outweighed any possible benefit I might receive from continued service. It was time for me to
I cried in my room for hours wishing my dad would not go, a whole month without him seemed like the end of the world. I would have no one to play hockey with, no one to tuck me in at night and no one to eat donuts with every Friday. My dad tried to console me but I was too angry to listen to him, I suddenly hated my grandpa for causing my dad to leave me alone. At the airport my dad gave me a long hug and told me to be brave since I was now “the man of the house,” (even though I am a girl), I had to take care of my mom. Promptly this made me suck in my tears and stop acting like a “loser.” It was hard repressing my feelings, seeing my dad leave made my eyes tear severely but I held them back, the man of the house does not cry. Time went by faster when I was at school, I had less time to miss my dad. About two weeks later, my mom got a call from India, my grandpa had died. My mom broke down crying, she slammed the phone across the room into the wall. I felt scared to appr...
Each of you here had your own relationship with my Dad, each of you has your own set of memories and your own word picture that describes this man. I don’t presume to know the man that you knew. But I hope that, in this eulogy that I offer, you will recognise some part of the man that we all knew, the man that is no longer amongst us, the man who will never be gone until all of us here have passed.
Imagine growing up without a father. Imagine a little girl who can’t run to him for protection when things go wrong, no one to comfort her when a boy breaks her heart, or to be there for every monumental occasion in her life. Experiencing the death of a parent will leave a hole in the child’s heart that can never be filled. I lost my father at the young of five, and every moment since then has impacted me deeply. A child has to grasp the few and precious recollections that they have experienced with the parent, and never forget them, because that’s all they will ever have. Families will never be as whole, nor will they forget the anguish that has been inflicted upon them. Therefore, the sudden death of a parent has lasting effects on those
The moment we stepped foot into the hospital, I could hear my aunt telling my mother that “he is in a better place now”. At that moment, something had already told me that my dad was deceased; it was like I could feel it or something. I felt the chills that all of a sudden came on my arms. As my mother and grandmother were both holding my hand, they took me into this small room. The walls were white, and it had a table with four tissue boxes sitting on the top. My other grandmother was there, and so were my two aunts, my uncles, and
Everyone has milestone days in his/her life that change the direction of his/her life for better or worse. Let me tell you one of my experiences that I will never forget from when I was 12 years old.